Wednesday, May 25, 2011

I did straight line quilting with the walking foot, spacing the lines about an inch apart from one another and turning corners to emphasize the off-center cross shape. In the above picture you can just barely see what I mean. There are some wrinkles in that picture because the quilt's been folded up since I washed it.

Here it is on my bed to try to get the whole thing in one shot -- it's not that wrinkly in real life, I just put it on top of my down comforter because I was too lazy to take the comforter off (and you can clearly see the lines where I folded it). You can get a good look at the quilting and at the finished color scheme from this angle. It's still more gold and orange than I expected it to be, but I like it fine.

A close-up of the center where the lines come together. I'm mightily pleased with how neat my block intersections are: nary a slightly-off corner to be seen!

I bought this embroidered quilt label from Anne on etsy. This square is part of the pieced back: I did one strip of squares going across the back -- the rest of the back is done with one of the fabrics I used for the front squares. The pieced back looks great, and best of all it meant that I didn't have to stress out so much about perfectly lining up the pattern repeat on the backing fabric.

The specifics:

size: about 70"x 84" (I was aiming for a lap quilt and I think I overshot a bit: this is more like a twin sized quilt. Oh well -- now they can use it when guests sleep over on the couch)Fabrics: Essex cotton/linen in "putty," various Joel Dewberry prints, mostly from Modern Meadow line with a few prints from Aviary 2; Amy Butler Full Moon Dots in green; Echino helicopters in orange; and a few other fat quarters I picked up at Purl Soho and whose fabric lines and designers I don't know. Batting is Warm and Natural 100% cotton. Gutermann cotton thread.

I've learned a lot about quilting from the three quilt projects I've made so far. My piecing is much straighter now, though not totally perfect; my cutting is a lot more accurate. I've gotten a lot better accustomed to the way my walking foot works, so there are fewer skips and puckers. Indeed, there is only one small tuck and a small slightly bubbled place in the entire quilt top: a real improvement over previous quilts. I learned with this quilt not to be too aggressive in smoothing the top as I quilted, as I found I was stretching it slightly, leading to some wrinkling and bubbling of the backing fabric. I basted this with pins, but I think I would baste future quilts with basting adhesive. It's not something I have wanted to do because I live in a small city apartment and I didn't want to get high on fumes, but I think it would make the puckering/bubbling much less of an issue. For this quilt I used cotton batting and cotton thread: I like the way the thread worked, but I have to say I am not a huge fan of the weight of the cotton batting -- this quilt is really quite heavy. It did wrinkle up beautifully in the wash, though. Maybe next time I'll follow Elizabeth Hartman's suggestion and try prewashed flannel instead of batting. I bet it would be cheaper, too.

I've become a huge quilting blog lurker recently! There are somanygorgeousquiltsoutthere! I think that my next project is going to be a half-square triangle quilt kind of like this.